Companies are rapidly adding dynamic, rich and interactive capabilities to improve user experiences, grow online audiences, and drive page views and transactions. As Web sites evolve toward completely rich, dynamic online channel experiences, businesses face a new, but stark challenge: this dynamic content cannot be cached and takes longer to load in a Web page. Today's consumers and business people have come to expect highly personal and interactive online experiences. Whether they are making a purchase, booking a reservation or watching a movie, they demand a smooth, flawless experience and they will not hesitate to click to another site when their expectations go unmet. Sluggish site performance and slower page downloads can diminish the user experience and increase site abandonment. The result is lower customer loyalty and revenue.
Content Distribution Network CDN providers Internet are currently offering traffic acceleration services to address the issue of Quality of Experience QoE for Internet based services from regular browsing to e-commerce. An example of an acceleration offering is the EdgePlatform [see: Beyond Caching; The User Experience Impact of Accelerating Dynamic Site Elements across the Internet, 2008]. The EdgePlatform provides the insight into Internet traffic patterns and is the dynamic site acceleration platform for three critical technologies used to carry site content requests from the customer's browser to the company's origin data center and back-in an instant.
The below mentioned three technologies compensate for the inadequacies of BGP, TCP and HTTP protocol and effectively create a new Internet platform for today's dynamic online businesses.                SureRoute for Performance        Transport Protocol Optimization        Prefetching        
Traffic acceleration is based on a set of components. These include; Domain Name Server DNS system with global mapping function, a set of distributed acceleration servers and a Service level Agreement SLA between a Content Distribution Network CDN provider and portal provider (web application provider). The SLA also means a set of configurations on the portal provider's DNS server.
The following steps summarize the acceleration process:
1. CDN provider's dynamic mapping system directs user requests for application content to an optimal acceleration server.
2. Route optimization technology identifies the fastest and most reliable path back to the origin infrastructure to retrieve dynamic application content.
3. A high-performance transport protocol transparently optimizes communications between the acceleration server and the origin, improving performance and reliability.
4. The acceleration server retrieves the requested application content and returns it to the user over secure optimized connections.
The first step requires a good knowledge of the proximity between the clients and the acceleration servers and constitutes the topic of the invention that will be described later in this application. The detailed description of the acceleration process of the system targeted in this invention is shown and described in the U.S. Pat. No. 7,660,296.
FIG. 1 belongs to prior art and discloses a system comprising an Internet Service Provider ISP network, an Internet network 5 and an operator's mobile network 6. The system is an overlay mechanism that operates by receiving IP packets at one set of servers, tunneling these packets through a series of servers, and delivering them to a fixed, defined IP address. Edge servers 13, 17 can be seen in the ISP network and in the Internet network. An origin edge server 13 is responsible for receiving, encapsulating and forwarding IP packets. A User edge server 17 is responsible for receiving, encapsulating and/or decapsulating and forwarding IP packets. The ISP comprises a target server 14 that is a machine whose traffic is to be tunneled through the overlay mechanism. The Internet network comprises a CDN provider DNS 3 that is responsible for selecting an appropriate user edge server to receive and forward IP traffic. The CDN provider DNS 3, origin edge server 13 and the User edge server 17 are parts of a CDN provider infrastructure 95, also called content delivery provider. The term “content delivery provider” refers to those services that at least distribute (provide) the existing content to the users (e.g. Akamai, YouTube). Thus, a content delivery provider may not generate the content (Akamai) or may generate the content (YouTube) in addition to delivering the content. A signaling point XYZ DNS 18 represents a portal provider's DNS. The operator's mobile network comprises a local DNS 16. The local DNS receives queries from a user for URL addresses for content delivery providers. The operator's mobile network further comprises a Gateway GPRS Support Node GGSN 11 and a Radio Network Controller RNC1 2. A user equipment or user terminal 1 is in radio connection with RNC1 in FIG. 1. Some of the entities in FIG. 1 will be explained more in detail together with FIG. 3 when the invention is explained later in this application.
FIG. 2 discloses a signal sequence diagram of a method according to prior art to find a suitable acceleration edge server and direct IP packets to/from the server via an acceleration tunnel. Signaling points 1,16,11,18,3,17,13 and included in FIG. 2 have been explained together with FIG. 1. The method according to prior art comprises the following steps:                A browser in the user equipment 1 sends 61 a DNS request for an URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of a provider portal. The purpose with the DNS request is to find out what IP address corresponds to a certain URL domain name in order to find a Web server that stores information that is of interest for the user. The local DNS server 16 of the operator receives the request and initiates a set of recursive DNS lookups.        The local DNS 16 queries the portal provider's DNS, i.e. the query is sent 62 from the local DNS 16 to the XYZ DNS 18. The portal provider is in this example named “XYZ”. The portal provider is a customer of the CDN operator and has the name server configured to return a pointer to the DNS server of the CDN provider according to the DNS redirection principle described in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,108,703.        An URL pointing at the CDN provider portal is returned 63.        The local DNS sends 64 a request to CDN provider DNS. According to the mapping mechanism described in the U.S. Pat. No. 7,660,296 the CDN operator selects a user edge server also called Edge region or called ES-User. The selection procedure is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,660,296. The selection is based on either the IP address of the user terminal 1 or the IP address of the local DNS server 16 from which the DNS request originated. The selected server in this example is the user edge server 17 in the Internet network. From the perspective of the mobile network the selected server will be suboptimal as it would reside outside the mobile network.        A content delivery provider redirect message (also called a name resolution reply message) is sent 65, 66 from the CDN provider DNS 3 via the local DNS 16 towards the user terminal 1. The IP address of the selected server 17 is hereby returned. The IP address is called the Virtual IP VIP.        IP packets destined towards the selected server 17 are sent 67 from the terminal 1.        A tunnel is created from the CDN providers User edge server 17 towards the origin edge server 13. The user packets are accelerated within the tunnel by mechanisms of the CDN provider. The portal provider server 14, i.e. the target server, gets the packets 68 and sends back a reply (web pages). Packets 69 from the portal provider server 14 are accelerated within the tunnel back to the selected server 17.        The terminal 1 receives 70 the packets.        
The CDN providers understand that in a few years Internet will be mostly accessed via mobile broadband rather than via fixed broadband. For this reason they will like to be able to offer their services to their customers (content delivery providers) in mobile networks, i.e. be able to perform acceleration of traffic for terminals connected to mobile networks. Currently, the furthest deployment of traffic acceleration servers in the mobile networks that the CDN providers can offer is at the Gateway GRPS Support Node GGSN level. However due to latencies existing below the GGSN [see: Latency in Broad-band Mobile Networks, C Serrano el at., Vodafone Group Networks], the CDN providers will like to be able to go deeper into the mobile network.
Deploying the accelerators at a Radio Network Node RNN (like a Radio Network Controller RNC in 3G networks or an eNodeB in Long-Term Evolution LTE networks) enables operators to be even closer to the end users, this way they can provide improved QoE (Quality of Experience) to end users and thereby create a new offering to their customers the content delivery providers. The main problem of deploying accelerator nodes below GGSN is that a problem of selecting the best user edge server arises. If a plurality of user edge servers are collocated with a plurality of RNNs (i.e. RNCs or eNodeBs), there currently is no direct logical association between the RNN and an attached terminal to enable the mapping function of CDN provider DNS to associate an RNN based user edge server with the terminal. The problem is further compounded by the fact that the IP address of the terminal which could be used to enable the mapping function to find a suitable user edge server is not visible to the mapping function as the GGSN is the IP anchor point for all mobile terminals. The selection of a suitable user edge server based on the ISP DNS server will also not work as it does not give enough granularity. Furthermore, there are 3GPP tunnels which run from the GGSN (or PDN-Gateway within the EPC Evolved Packet Core) to the RNN and from the RNN to the terminal and special operations must be done to enable the CDN provider acceleration mechanism to be able to accelerate traffic at the RNN level.